


Five Scenes from a Starship

by halotolerant



Category: Doctor Who, Take That
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, kidz video universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-13
Updated: 2011-08-13
Packaged: 2017-10-22 14:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story behind the world we saw in the music video for 'Kidz' - how did they wind up on a time-travelling spaceship anyway?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Scenes from a Starship

One:

The stars still guide him.

There had been storms in the Atlantic, sparkling skies glimpsed like the face of a merciful God through the thick, grey clouds. There had been calms in the Pacific, constellations trekking their slow way across the sky, faster than Gary’s man of war on the stagnant ocean.

On the deck, the day of the last battle, he’d looked up at that sky, waiting for whatever would happen after the last of his blood drained away, and when he’d seen the light descending he’d feared some cataclysm, some comet falling, and had tried with a last gurgling breath to warn his men.

But he’d awoken on the _Ouroboros_ , with a new hand of a slick and intricate metal, and a new course to set his helm towards.

But still the stars were there, outside the vast windows, so many millions of them.

They travelled in space and also in time, in more time than Gary could truly conceptualise, and yet the stars scarcely altered.

 _Captain Orange is interested in Earth, and the human era_ , Marcus had tried to explain to him. _That is not very far and not at all long._

They had sat down together on one of the long benches running along the viewing deck.

 _You know why men lead other men into battle_ , Marcus had explained softly. _We shall need you._

Gary lets the stars guide him, when so little else is certain, and more and more that metal hand is steady at the steering, and he has faith.

\- - -

Two:

The music never ends.

He made his first drum the day he became a man, it was the way of Howard’s tribe and even though the Latins had ruled over them many years they kept the Day of Drums and on the spring morning when the shaman called, the valley resounded with the beating of stick on taut hide.

He enlisted – almost all the young men did – and marched in perfect rhythm away to war in a distant desert inhabited with men who breathed melody through the flute and rang vibrations through beautiful gourd-like resonators.

The legion trumpets were the last music he heard, the day of the last battle, the day the armies ran at each other without respite until the ground pounded, and when it began to shake as if the earth itself wished to throw their violence from its skin, until Howard had wondered if Hades himself would ride up from the Underworld in his chariot and say _, Enough. I have Enough. You have filled my Halls with your dead. Cease._

But he’d awoken in a strange smooth room with Marcus, Admiral Barlow and Captain Orange - three persons who he eventually accepted were very much alive, though he had yet to be convinced were also simply men.

On the ship of flying metal called the _Ouroboros_ there were long passageways of treasures, and a great many of them were instruments, and it was to these the man called Captain Orange had led  him, at first.

Then the devices, the magical devices from which the music of many instruments could be produced from a flat, grooved discus.

Marcus loved above all things to dance – Howard believed for a while that his purpose was to entertain this strange godling, neither in command of Captain Orange nor obedient to him.

 _You know what beauty, what joy, a crowd of people may be_ , Marcus had told him, falling to the ground with happy gasping after a dance, half-hypnotising to a beat Howard had found in his very blood. _That is why we need you._

\- - -

Three:

Knowledge is not always wisdom.

The physics involved in how Captain Orange had found him do not concern Rob at all. He was born in a time when survival took precedence over questions, be they religious, magical, philosophical or leaning towards that concept not yet invented in the England of his time, _scientific_.

In the life he has left they had called him Robin of the Hood. He had been on the outskirts of society, laughing to see the dignity of those at its pinnacle tumble.

He had fought a war with no lines, no battlefields, no one cause and no surrender. A war of the hungry against the fed, the oppressed against the mighty, the small against the great.

Then had come the long dark night in the convent, a poisoned arrow in his guts, John at his side weeping, and then the light, the bright, bright light descending as the Sisters prayed, and then for the first time he had seen them, the Band.

Now, having been travelling with them either a short or a long while, depending on whether you reckon it by how time seems or what millennia they apparently straddle in the time it takes to flip a coin – and Rob is not particularly concerned by the distinction – he’s learnt almost before anything else that his kind of people never went away, that a thousand years before and a thousand years after him, on Earth and a myriad of other worlds he never guessed at, young men still hide under wide hoods and taunt and terrorise from the dark edges.

Admiral Barlow doesn’t like him. _Are you quite determined upon this course?_ Rob had heard him ask Orange, the first evening. _I do not think he is like the rest of us_.

 _Similarity is not strength_ , Orange had replied. Not ‘I trust him’ or ‘He is skilled and worthy’ or ‘He is at least less boring than you’, all of which Rob would have rather heard and was hurt that he did not.

There is something about Orange, the way he studies you from behind what Rob has learnt to call _spectacles_ , something about the way he waits till you have finished shouting and stomping about and then speaks slowly, quietly, that makes you want those careful judgements to be in your favour.

And yet Captain Orange is not exactly in charge. Luckily for Rob, however, despite his rank, neither is Admiral Barlow – the title, it seems, is from his old life, which apparently fell some six or seven hundred years after Rob’s and yet dispatched him to Orange before Rob arrived.

 _(Do not think on it. End up feeling sick_. That is Howard of North Clan’s advice, and Rob is happy to take it. )

So whatever Barlow thinks from under that raised eyebrow – _If only you had been born those centuries earlier, to ride with your pompousness under one of my trees_ , Rob wishes wistfully – it is not apparently his decision to make.

Marcus is not the leader either, and Rob appreciates this because he does not think he could ever quite like a man in charge of him, and he wishes to like Marcus a great deal.

 _You are so angry,_ Marcus tells him gently, on one of their long walks around the viewing deck – Barlow is some way back, watching them, and Rob puts his arm round Marcus’ shoulders.

 _You are so angry and you do not understand why anyone should mend anything if another solution is to break something else. We need you._

Marcus carefully steps away from him, looks up, plaintive. _Life has not taught you to be wise. There is a lot for you to learn, and I have a great wish to teach you._

\- - -

Four:

Be careful what you conjure.

They had not even the word for shaman – Howard taught him that one afterwards – but in his life Marcus might be called so. He was of a tribe on the Western Plains when the giant mammoths wandered without heed through the blizzard wastes. From his mother he had some little skill with spider webs and bark, and because it soothed his people he would gnaw bones and throw them, telling their shapes, or watch the scraggy birds in flight, wheeling in the wind until they dropped, exhausted, and predict the weather.

There was the Tribe and only the Tribe, until one warm-time when the Others came.

Marcus had seen clashes at the mating times and fireside squabbles for food. Not this. Not these plans, these terrible imaginings rising like flames.

He told them it was Forbidden, like the eating of dead flesh, for what would it produce but more dead flesh and tears?

They killed him first, and he was to discover that they took a man yearly thereafter and spilt his blood upon the ground to ensure victory in the killings that were to follow.

But first he awoke in a cave with a pale man holding warmed water to his lips.

 _Run_ , Marcus told him, _for they will kill you too, they will kill all Others and I have failed._

The man raised his hands and peeled the skin from them – gloves, Marcus learned later.

 _Every time I wish to give up_ , the man said, _one of you convinces me to try again._

 _Run,_ Marcus told him, _run now and do not look back for me, the killing will not stop._

The man’s eyes were deep and wet as water. _I come from a place where this killing is called War, and where it has destroyed everything, until we have consumed ourselves._

Marcus wept: _Then let me die, for no road leads anywhere else._

The man rested his chin on his hand: _But they could do. And I need you._

\- - -

Five:

A teaspoon and an open mind.

He has told them to call him Captain Orange. Even the name ‘Doctor’ is too suspicious now, too likely to drag other interests into this.

They suspect he is not human, he knows. But they seem content not to know more, at least for now.

He watches them, his collection of four, his allies.

His friends.

Humanity is very fragile and it is very strong and it is above all deeply surprising.

He takes another sip of tea – twelve regenerations and still his favourite – and waits for the fruits of yesterday and tomorrow.

\- - -

 


End file.
